We are delighted to present three works by Amanda Hicks from the Kettle’s Yard collection, created by the artist when she was aged between 13 and 15. This display coincides with the exhibition Paint What Matters! which featured the work of children and young people in Cambridge between the ages of 4 and 21 years old.
Amanda Hicks was born and grew up on the Isles of Scilly, off the coast of Cornwall. Her parents were friends with Kettle’s Yard founders Jim and Helen Ede, who would visit the family at their home on St Agnes. Aged 12, Hicks left the island to attend boarding school on mainland Cornwall. Isles of Scilly and Launch from St Mary’s and St Agnes, both created when Hicks was 13 years old, were inspired by her recollections of the lobster pots on the beach and the boisterous seas around the islands. Painted a couple of years later, Tresco, Isles of Scilly depicts a calm and idyllic vision of the islands, informed by her yearning for the landscapes of her childhood.
Jim Ede secured open invitations for Hicks to visit the St Ives studios of Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, but discouraged her from attending art school, admiring the immediacy of her painting style. Hicks now lives on St Agnes where she and her husband, Adrian Pearce, owned and ran a flower shop up until their retirement.
Jim and Helen Ede were fascinated by the creativity of children and there are numerous examples of artworks by young people in the Kettle’s Yard house. A drawing by their granddaughter, Jane Adams, created when she was just five years old, is displayed in Jim Ede’s bathroom alongside works by some of the most celebrated artists of the twentieth century, including Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson. The Edes also owned several books about art by children, including R.R. Tomlinson’s 1944 Children as Artists and L.A. Doust’s 1942 Drawing Lessons for Children (Ages 5-10). For the Edes, anyone and everyone could be an artist.
Children’s art was an important source of inspiration for artists in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1943, the influential art historian Herbert Read, whom the Edes knew, published his important study Education Through Art in which he stated his view that ‘the aim of education is the creation of artists’. A couple of years later, Read organised the exhibition Children in England Paint, which featured 52 watercolours by children aged between 4 and 16 and toured from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to museums across America. Some of the artists most closely associated with Kettle’s Yard, including Christopher Wood and Alfred Wallis, developed a direct style reminiscent of art by children. Like the teenage Amanda Hicks, they painted seascapes imbued with emotional charge and childhood nostalgia.
